I don’t know if polygenetic testing is going to have a significant effect, but if it does, there is going to be a significant generation gap in intelligence, and that will have unpredictable consequences in education and the labor market.
Its not quite as damaging as 'people are rich because they work harder' but its really not far off
Wealthy people who came from nothing are the exception. Even in places with high degrees of social mobility, climbing the social ladder is a multi-generational saga. Maybe a working class family has a child or two who enter the professional class, then maybe their child has the opportunity for their family to finance a company that goes big, like Dell or Microsoft, or maybe break in as an actor or sports figure. Most likely though, their kids also enter the professional class where the family rolls the dice again the next generation.
> Most rich people are rich because they were born into it.
Both of these can be true at the same time!
Many of those ways happen to be morally questionable at best, and criminal at worst.
An artistic genius is very likely to lose out financially to an averagely intelligent slum landlord no matter how hard they work. Because the opportunities to make money from artistic genius are heavily skewed towards failure, while for slum landlords they're heavily skewed towards success.
The handful of exceptions in the arts are survivor bias. No one hears about the many more failures, by definition.
There is no sense in which wealth is a level playing field. If you're not born into wealth - still the number one way to be wealthy - the most obviously rewarded trait isn't intelligence, it's sociopathy.
The successful ultra-rich are notorious for greed, selfishness, and lack of empathy. Go to any social event for the ultra-rich and you'll find a disproportionate number of criminals, narcissists, and other kinds of damaged people.
Those are the qualities that make someone a "success". IQ certainly helps, but if you lack the pathological motivation to exploit others it's not going to get you far on its own.
Lottery winners have had no experience in managing wealth, often have had years and decades of being impoverished and wishing for products like jewelry that was always out of reach, and then they get inundated with money. They found that who marshmallow experiment was literally kids who have their needs met aren't rushing to consume what's in front of them and that patience pays off.
You're not making any argument here other than when you're born wealthy you're more likely to be wealthy, and that we know.
More - https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/generational-wealth%3A-why-d...
OF COURSE smart people are more likely than average to become rich! How could it be otherwise, unless the only way to become rich was luck?
Now, some people are born rich! But even if it's just the self-made rich that are smarter than average, and people born rich are exactly average (unlikely as intelligence/attractiveness/etc are at least partly inheritable), that means that rich people are ALSO smarter than average. ('above average' averaged with 'exactly average' is still 'above average')
Or perhaps you can admit that in many cases people have achieved moderate to high wealth in democratic free market societies by either working harder or worker smarter than their peers?
Another reason is luck. My father worked from nothing to owning a house in a nice place because he had a skill that was in demand. He nearly lost it all and is now scraping a living in his 70's, because technology made his skill less valuable. 10 more years of luck he would have retired at 50 and I would have had the advantages...
Someone, mentioned that rich people were better looking. Perhaps they are just healthier, better dressed, and better groomed?
Even in your example, how did they get themselves born into a democratic free market society?
Luck.
Some people really dont like that answer, since it makes them feel vulnerable.
They'd rather blame a victim, and worship a lottery winner than accept that some things are outside their control.
I’m exaggerating, but anecdotally HN does have this reputation.
Have you thought about the obvious implication that embryo selection with polygenic scoring could be used to lower the gap between genetically privileged types of people you describe and the average couple deciding to apply to procedure?
What's needed: an egalitarian policy & infrastructure allowing any couple to improve the genetic basis of their progeny, perhaps with more of it being provided to genetically disprivileged.
We have an obligation to provide our children and the whole society with an opportunity to live a better life.
> and that will have unpredictable consequences in education and the labor market
The "gap" of single digit amount of IQ points added won't have such effect, but over generations it can compound into a more thoughtful, creative, capable and lively humanity.
Should we deprive ourselves of such possibility due to a generic NIMBY-like market anxiety?
Of course. If we boost an entire generation’s IQ at birth and eventually introduce them into the adult population, what is going to happen is that the boosted generation is going to basically dominate the right hand side of the graph. If you visualize two bell curves superimposed on one another, with one of those curves shifted to the right, then that’s what you’re going to get.
The degree of augmentation is going to make a big difference. During the era of the Flynn effect, we sort of had this happen naturally and we handled it just fine, but a 20 point boost would basically obliterate things.
I’m not necessarily opposed to doing this BTW. I just think it’s going to be extremely disruptive and unpredictable.
> over generations it can compound into a more thoughtful, creative, capable and lively humanity.
Yes, that’s what the original eugenicists thought, too. Here’s the problem, though: what do you do with all of those old and busted natural humans who are less thoughtful, less creative, less capable, less lively? Because those people are really mad that they lost their jobs, and they’re obviously not as intelligent or beautiful or morally good as the new and improved humanity. I mean, all you’ve done was to erase the unfair gap between the below average member of your generation and the above average member of theirs. Those people are all privileged and entitled jerks, and all they’re doing is causing problems.
Oh, did you really think we’d also manage to isolate and eliminate the gene responsible for the human tendency to dehumanize the outgroup? You sweet summer child.
The Flynn effect has not been genetic, and it didn't translate into differences in actual, real-world performance in a way that IQ difference within cohort do.
First though I'd like to see some more resource-sharing of this nature and scale from the rich. Let's see a pilot program or something because I don't see all that much global-scale sharing of the technologies that can most improve life.
When you say things like "deprive ourselves" it's not hard to see that you perceive yourself to be in the group that will benefit either way. Which is fine I think but my life has led me to more easily imagine myself and my descendants on the other side of it.
Yes, we do this. We did this with smallpox vaccination, we’re doing it with polio vaccines, HIV drugs, water purification systems, mobile phone network infrastructure, nets that are treated to protect from malaria-bearing mosquitoes. Sometimes people in rich countries go out of their way to invent technology that gives us no benefit but provides tremendous benefit to people in poorer countries, such as Norman Borlaug’s work. The global poor have become less poor to a much greater degree than the global rich have gotten richer.
Most people think this is not the case only because media is not telling about it, because there is little to tell about really. Except extreme cases like https://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/29/janitor-secretly-amassed-an-...
